Appalachia Year

Not to get all meta, but sometimes my silly blog bothers me. I worry that I come off as unbalanced, miserable, bratty. I don't seem to document the moments that I'm walking to school and I stop dead in my tracks in awe of how good the sun feels on my face. When I zombie-shuffle downstairs in the morning, slept-on bangs sticking straight up, eyes puffed shut, and the sound of the coffee percolating is like a string quartet. When my roommate catches me fist-pumping the cold air in the kitchen when the coffee's finished brewing. There seems to be a fallacy that marries well-being inextricably to contentment and satisfaction. I think that notion can be simplistic and misleading - for me, it's about sunken, bottomless pain and intoxicating, frenetic pleasure. Beyond that, well-being is not binary. It's every boring little aspect of your life buzzing in different, wonderful frequencies, the wailing dissonance you hear when someone asks you what you're thinking about, the knowledge that you like that sound, that sound is home, but it's okay to be honest with yourself when your heart hurts and you don't know why.

Instead of taking gray awful winter quarter off emotionally, I'd like to take this quarter on. Toil my little grad student heart out, be eyeball-deep in research for my thesis, and so annoyingly productive that I won't have anything in common with myself anymore. And then I'll wake up one day and it'll be April 1st and Nick and I will be riding our bikes downtown to see Morrissey at the Palace Theatre.

Winter is a drag. It always is. February is worse than January. Today, though, with the sun rising over the snow-dusted tile rooftops, fat bluejays and cardinals bouncing along the oak bough outside my bedroom window, I had a thought anathema to my typical winter-hating, morning-cursing self: I can't wait to get outside.